Tuesday, January 24, 2006

Go figure

Yesterday a Handspring Visor Pro with 16MB RAM, a 33 MHz processor and Palm OS version 3.5.2.H sold for $145.50 on eBay.

About three hours before that a Tapwave Zodiac 2 with 128MB RAM, a 200Mhz Processor and Palm OS version 5.2.7, sold for $130.11 on eBay.

The Handspring Visor Pro doesn't have a color screen, but a 160 by 160 pixel 4-bit (16 shades of gray) monochrome screen. It weighs 5.7 oz and runs on 2 AAA batteries.

The Zodiac 2 has a 480 x 320 (half VGA), 16-bit color backlit display (65,536 colors), and weighs 6.3 ounces. It has an ATI graphics accelerator, Yamaha sound system, Bluetooth, two SD slots, one of them an SDIO slot for Wi-Fi cards etc.

Tapwave closed it doors in July 2005 when venture capital dried up.

Handspring was bought by Palm in June 2003

The only possible reasons I can think of for someone paying more for an older handheld (released in 2001) are:
- Palm still supports the Visors (see Palm Visor Pro Support)
- There are still numerous springboard expansions modules available for the Handspring, everything from MP3 players to voice recorders to GPS devices.
- The Visor Pro runs off AAA batteries

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